Review: In ‘Project a Black Planet' at the Art Institute, artists from all over expand on the idea of Pan-Africanism

Chicago Tribune

17-02-2025

How to say 'Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica,' an ambitious, magnificent, jam-packed survey currently on view at the Art Institute? Put the stress on the first syllable and you have a noun meaning collaborative undertaking; put it on the second and you get a verb denoting the promotion of a particular view. Both are apropos. So, too, are the tracks from Public Enemy's 1990 album 'Fear of a Black Planet' that might be playing in your head.
Pan-Africanism is a theory that proclaims peoples of African descent, worldwide as a group with shared ancestry and experiences of oppression and calls on them to unite for a better future. It's been around since about 1900. 'Project a Black Planet' explores its cultural manifestations through more than 350 objects created by artists from Africa, North and South America and Europe; the show is the centerpiece of an array of programming taking place throughout the museum and the city. Regenstein Hall, which houses the exhibition, looks magnificent. The lobby sets the tone, grand and diverse, with plenty of surprises and interconnections. Wooden gods flank the entryway, a recent one by Wangechi Mutu, all sinuous and muddy, and an older one by Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos, carved and rigid. Six huge modernist panels line the walls, illustrating a boldly revisionist pantheon of Black art through the ages, reproductions of the originals Hale Aspacio Woodruff painted for Clark Atlanta University in 1952. A clever Y-shaped bench provides inspired visitor seating — it's why-shaped, get it? — designed by Chicagoan Norman Teague, whose usable furniture is found throughout the show. Above it all hangs Awol Erizku's rotating disco ball — glittery, gold, and in the unmistakable form of the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti.
There's nothing simple about a hundred-year exploration of Pan-Africanism, and the curators have wisely organized their show according to a dozen genuinely helpful themes, including related movements like Garveyism and Négritude, and concepts such as Interdependence and Agitation, rather than chronologically or by artist nationality. Indeed, the whole question of nationhood is sidestepped by identifying artists according only to their cities of birth and death. Borders have always been part of the problem, and so the Pan-African flag — an instantly recognizable rectangle of red, black, and green bands that dates to around 1920 — enables David Hammons's fusion of it with the Stars and Stripes to create his 'African American Flag,' likewise Chris Ofili's melding of it with the Union Jack, to make the 'Union Black.' Where to plant those transnational flags? Here, for now.
'Project a Black Planet' features other critically reconfigured trappings of government and state. Arthur Bispo do Rosário handcrafted elaborately beribboned and embroidered military-style jackets belonging to no army, as well as a sizable model ship festooned with dozens of fanciful flags. Invented languages figure in the compositions of Omar El-Nagdi, Radcliffe Bailey and Ahmed Cherkaoui. The hefty catalogue mentions Dread Scott's issuing, at the 2024 Venice Biennale, of passports to an imaginary 'All African People's Community.' Even real governments have gotten in on the act: in 1961, the newly independent countries of West Africa founded Air Afrique as an alternative to imperialist transportation networks. An original advertisement hangs amid the expansive display of magazines, hymnals, documentary photographs, newspapers, LPs, festival brochures, and book series laid out in vitrines at the center of the exhibition, tracing a timeline of ways in which Pan-Africanism spread through print and popular media. Artist Cauleen Smith's watercolors of the volumes on her 'Human_3.0 Reading List' provide a charming literary supplement.
Portraiture serves many purposes in 'Project a Black Planet.' Seminal figures in the history of Pan-Africanism are introduced, beginning with 18th century precursor Toussaint L'Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, present courtesy of a scrappy plywood and newsprint collage by Lubaina Himid. The singer Miriam Makeba, whose outspokenness against the apartheid regime led to her being stripped of her South African citizenship, appears twice: in an iconic photograph of her onstage in 1955, and in a painting by Meleko Mokgosi, where that same image is blown up and hung on the wall of a yellow interior in which a young man sits, thinking. Unnamed subjects abound, from Marlene Dumas's haunting 'Albino,' with his unforgettably opalescent visage, to Nicholas Hlobo's inscrutable life-size sculpture of a young man, his jeans hanging low, his upper body bent over and disappeared into an enormous black rubber sack. Liz Johnson Artur generously, lovingly represents the communities of South London in her ongoing archive, here shown as a 20-minute video.
Most exceptional are a selection of busts arranged together on a stepped platform, among them Simone Leigh's stylized depiction of choreographer Katherine Dunham, with a raffia torso and glass-beaded face; Demas Nwoko's serpentine 'Head of a Lady,' shaped from terracotta; and Conceição dos Bugres's powerful but wee wood stump of a figurine. Sampling the breadth and depth of Pan-African aesthetics, these 13 effigies form a mini exhibition all their own.
A second show-within-the-show is a wall of small artworks hung salon-style, as if in a Pan-African living room. Indeed, many of these pictures either depict people at home or are studies of psychological interiority. Zanele Muholi does both in an enigmatic color photograph of two women in a washtub: nude, bent over, their sides tightly touching, they are like two halves of a loving whole. Across the gallery rises a model for another type of private space, Martin Puryear's movable, magical 'Sanctuary,' a hollow wood cube perched high atop a pair of twisted saplings, whose roots clutch the axis of the wheel that forms their base.
Near the end, 'Project a Black Planet' looks backward in order to better look forward. The dead are celebrated with Ebony G. Patterson's carnivalesque coffins, perhaps even more so than when they were alive. In a rare example of figuration by El Anatsui, ancestral spirits cacophonously converge via some two dozen roughly carved pieces of weathered wood, each a different shade and bearing unique expressions, decorative cuts, and dabs of paint. Charmaine Spencer's 'Air' — five long, thick clusters of bells, cast from shredded notes written by participants to their forebears, tangled with vintage African beads—hangs in the exhibition's final gallery, silent but waiting to be stirred by visitors who, having seen the entirety of 'Project a Black Planet,' will hopefully go on to do just that.